Excitement around the business opportunities presented by artificial intelligence (AI) is palpable, but it comes hand-in-hand with very tough investment decisions.

AI is complex and fast moving. It also requires businesses to carefully consider the implications on ethics, reproducibility, auditability, data security and data management practices.

With so many significant investments being made off the back of AI, its vitally important that businesses have a thorough grasp of these to ensure their investments pay off.

Alongside our work developing custom AI solutions, we see an increasing number of clients ask for our support in validating their machine learning practices and providing impartial advice to better inform their investment decisions. This applies equally to AI being developed in-house or by a potential M&A target.

This was the case recently when we were asked by the CFO of an established medical start-up to audit their machine learning approach and organisation. The invitation came ahead of an investment milestone for a ground-breaking genetic sequence based diagnostic. This allowed the Board to go into their investor discussions with confidence in the performance of their technology and organisation. I discuss the project in more depth in the video below.

If you’d like to talk more about our AI consultancy services or any other business challenge needing a unique AI solution, please get in touch at tim.ensor@cambridgeconsultants.com

My next video, out on 26 May, will discuss how to get Edge AI to work at its best, which was a true multidisciplinary project from our semiconductor and machine learning teams in collaboration with an Asian technology giant.

Transcript

There is, rightly, a lot of excitement about new businesses that artificial intelligence can enable. However, the technology is complex and fast moving. Many of our clients are having to make significant investment decisions on the back of AI developed either in-house or by a potential M&A target. But how do you ensure your investments in AI pay-off?

We were recently asked by the CFO of an established medical start-up to audit their machine learning approach and organisation. The invitation came ahead of an investment milestone for a ground-breaking genetic sequence based diagnostic. This allowed the Board to go into their investor discussions with confidence in the performance of their technology and organisation.

I’m Tim Ensor, and I lead the AI Capability at Cambridge Consultants.

This is the third of a series of short videos on ‘The AI opportunity’. I’m sharing our most recent AI projects; the challenges they address for industry and the opportunities they are creating for the ambitious businesses that have engaged them.

The data science team at our client had been working extremely hard over a couple of years to build a machine learning pipeline for classifying genetic sequence data capable of diagnosing a variety of serious disease conditions. Because these algorithms were the basis of a future medical diagnosis, they also needed to consider reproducibility, auditability, data security, data management and a host of other factors.

Working closely alongside the client team, we found they were great at data science and machine learning but needed some help to understand how to build technology for a medically regulated application. We advised on areas of improvement in software and data processes, risk management, technology strategy and new leadership roles. Our advice on reproducibility went right down to details like the need to record the seeds for algorithm random number generators.

Thanks to our work, the client had confidence to unlock its validation data-set and move towards fund raising for their next investment milestone. We’ve also continued to support the team in implementing some of the changes.

If you’d like to talk more about assessing and developing robust AI teams, process and technology or any other business challenge needing a unique AI solution, please get in touch.

Tim is the Director of Artificial Intelligence at Cambridge Consultants. He works with clients across many sectors to help them achieve business impact with world-changing technology innovation. Tim has had a string of commercial leadership roles focused on innovation in fields including telecoms, logistics and energy and working with world-leading AI, robotics and connectivity technology. He's an electronic engineer, Cambridge MBA and optimistic about using technology to make the world better.

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